Fides Becker

Robe 4

2005

Fides Becker developed and pursued her picturesque strategies in the illusionistic pictorial space. Her practice explores intimate worlds through objects and materials we associate with the private sphere in everyday life. Sofas, beds, curtains, mirrors and sheets are reconstituted in her paintings as fragments, details or dissolving surfaces that engage with the ambiguities between presence and absence, past and present and personal and collective images. Fides Becker studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt a.M., at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam and the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Her works can be found in numerous national and international collections, such as the National Collection of Rhineland-Palatinate, the Art Collection of the German Bank or the Stichting Beeldende Art Amsterdam. Fides Becker lives in Frankfurt and Berlin. She develops and pursues her painterly strategies in the large-format illusionistic picture space with a subversive play of light and color. In her pure painting on canvas, she reflects everyday objects, places or rooms from other epochs with a mysterious patina, which are culturally connected in our society. She inhales them with emotions and lends these dead objects an independent life. In this way, they receive something essential, and at the same time, morbid ambivalence, which makes the penetration of space and time experience in our present-day reality. Thus, Fides Becker inspired the old Jewish cemetery at the Börneplatz in Frankfurt and the Jewish cemetery in Berlin Weißensee, where the eternal peace of the dead can not be disturbed and nature protects itself over the graves, to their large format golem landscapes. The figure of the Jewish legend spreads in Central Europe. While the variants of the Berlin Spiegelsaal in Clara’s Ballhaus or the Loge evoke glamor and glory of former times, it moves with the almost romantic midnight blue Rhineland-Palatinate dacha under trees and the two leather canapés in the Contre Jour of an English gentility club in private spheres. Certainly, man plays a central role with his feelings in the oeuvre of Fides Becker. Even though, in her recent works, she is more concerned with the recording of human traces, following her studio scholarship at the Cité International des Arts Paris, that decisive transformation in her artistic work from 2010 to today has been accomplished: for she turned from the collage technique and pure painting, and since then renounced the human figure entirely in her pictures. Nevertheless, she is still concerned with human sensations such as longing, desire, fear, but also lust and passion, which she wants to make sensual in her pictures. In doing so, she does not pursue any new themes, but she is seeking a new approach to her well-known motifs - the beds, landscapes and interiors.